Dialects reflect the general language diversified by localities.
A dialect is a variation in the pronunciation, and necessarily in the orthography of words, or a peculiarity of phrase or idiom, usually accompanied by a tone which seems to be as local as the word it utters. It is a language rarely understood out of the sphere of the population by whom it is appropriated. A language is fixed in a nation by a flourishing metropolis of an extensive empire, a dialect may have existed coeval with that predominant dialect which by accident has become the standard or general language; and moreover, the contemned dialect may occasionally preserve some remains or fragments of the language which, apparently lost, but hence recovered, enable us rightly to understand even the prevalent idiom.
All nations have had dialects. Greece had them, as France, and Italy have them now. Homer could have included in a single verse four or five dialects; but though the Doric and the Ionic were held the most classical, none of them were barbarous, since their finest writers have composed in these several dialects. Even some Italian poets and comic writers have adopted a favourite dialect; but no classical English author could have immortalised any one of our own.
Ancient Greece, as Mitford describes, "though a narrow country, was very much divided by mountains and politics." And mountains and politics, which impede the general intercourse of men, inevitably produce dialects. Each isolated state with fear or pride affected its independence, not only by its own customs, but by its accent or its phrase. In France the standard language was long but a dialect. There potent nobles, each holding a separate court and sovereignty in his own province, offered many central points of attraction. The Counts of Foix, of Provence and of Toulouse, and the Dukes of Guienne, of Normandy and of Brétagne, were all munificent patrons of those who cultivated what they termed "l'art du beau parler," each in their provincial idiom. These were all subdivisions of the two rival dialects to which the Romane language had given birth. But the river Loire ran between them; and a great river has often been the boundary of a dialect: France was thus long divided. On the south of the Loire their speech was called the language of _Oc_, and on the north the language of _Oil_; names which they derived from the different manner of the inhabitants pronouncing the affirmative _Oui_. The language of the poetical Troubadours on the south of the Loire had not the happier destiny of its rival, used by the Trouvères on the north. It was this which became the standard language, while the other remains a dialect. Here we have a remarkable incident in the history of dialects in a great country; it was long doubtful which was to become the national language; and it has happened, if we may trust an enthusiast of Languedoc, that his idiom, expressing with more vowelly softness and _naïveté_ the familiar emotions of love and friendship, and gaiety and _bonhomie_, gave way to a harsher idiom and a sharp nasal accent; and all ended by the Parisian detecting the provincials by their shibboleth, and calling them all alike Gascons, and their taste for exaggeration and rhodomontade gasconades; while the southerns, who hold that what is called the French language is only a perversion of their own dialect, like our former John Bull, fling on the Parisian the old Gaulish appellative of _Franchiman_.[1]